Everyone at Blackrock Was Homesick Except the Boy With Turnips

Every September a school dormitory somewhere fills up with boys crying into their pillows. In 1898, at Blackrock College outside Dublin, one boy lay awake in the dark listening to it with genuine bafflement.

He was fifteen and from Bruree, County Limerick. He had won a junior grade exhibition worth twenty pounds, and Blackrock had agreed to take the twenty pounds instead of fees. Until then his schooling had happened around a farm. He took the morning train to the Christian Brothers in Charleville, seven miles away, and walked home, because there was no evening train. Then there were turnips to chop for the cattle.

So when he arrived at a college with beds, dinners, a chapel, a study hall and no turnips at all, he looked round the dormitory at boys missing home and could not see what the problem was.

The study hall, in particular, was not a punishment. It was a room with light where nobody needed you to see to a cow. He had to be got out of it. Nobody at Blackrock had ever needed to explain to a boy that a study hall was not the reward for the cows.

And then the books. He had never owned books before. He wrote his name in them, and then wrote it again, in case the first one was challenged.

I have tried to recreate this attitude to study in my own home. When we moved to Brussels I gave each child a desk, a lamp and a quiet corner, and waited for the gratitude of the scholarship boy.

The eldest used the lamp to dry a pair of football socks. The middle one wrote her name on her desk, once, in marker, then underlined it, which I take to be the right instinct applied to the wrong furniture. The youngest asked when she would be allowed to go home, and was gently reminded that she was at home, and cried harder.

My husband, who grew up in the Home Counties and never chopped a turnip in his life, says the difference is motivation. I said the difference is twenty pounds and seven miles on foot. He said in that case we should stop driving them to school. The children have not been told about this conversation, and I would ask readers to keep it that way.

The boy from Bruree kept his books for the rest of his long life. Many years later they went back to Blackrock, signed over and over by a boy who had needed everyone to know they were his.

Ours are in a box marked LOFT. Nobody has signed anything. The football socks are dry.